“Where?” Giogi cried, pulling back on the horse’s reins.
“Don’t stop!” Mother Lleddew ordered, her wrinkled face tight with panic.
Giogi stood in his seat and looked at the temple. It was the girl he’d spoken with the night before. “We can’t leave her!” he objected.
“You must,” the priestess insisted. “She’s a Shard. It’s her duty to protect the temple. Mine is to protect you. Now go!”
Giogi stared at the girl, shimmering still like a moonbeam in the shadow. “But she’s just a girl,” he said, unable to bring himself to abandon so helpless a creature.
“She just looks like a girl,” Lleddew argued, moving forward to take the reins from Giogi. A pair of ghouls dropped onto the carriage roof from an overhead branch. One slammed into Mother Lleddew and succeeded at knocking her to the ground. The other lunged at Olive. Giogi stopped the carriage immediately.
These ghouls stank with an overwhelming odor of rotting meat. The halfling doubled over with nausea, but managed to sidestep the undead attack anyway. Brandishing her dagger, she whirled about to keep the creature in sight. “You really need a bath, pal,” she gasped. “Why don’t you go jump in the lake?”
To Olive’s astonishment, the creature immediately turned from her, hopped off the carriage roof, and headed down the hill.
Realization and recognition flamed in the halfling’s mind. “It just obeyed me. A ghast! That was a ghast! I just commanded a ghast!” she cried excitedly. “The potion only works on ghasts!”
Suddenly remembering Mother Lleddew, Olive looked down at the ground. The other ghast had the priestess pinned to the ground with its inhuman strength. Olive scrambled down from the carriage roof and gave the creature a kick, trying not to inhale its odor.
“Get off her, you stupid undead,” Olive ordered the ghast.
The ghast stood up and blinked its bloodshot eyes in confusion.
“Go away!” Olive shouted.
The ghast stumbled off into the woods.
“Ugh!” Olive grunted. She bent over the priestess. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Mother Lleddew groaned. Her shift had been slashed in a dozen places, and she was bleeding profusely. Her breath was husky and labored, and the whites of her eyes had gone strangely dark. Olive couldn’t tell if these were symptoms of an injury or an effect of the ghast’s touch. She tried to pull the large woman to her feet, but Lleddew slumped against the halfling, driving Olive to her knees.
“Damn! Giogi, give me a hand here!” Olive cried.
Oblivious to the undead closing in on the carriage, Giogi stood on the driver’s seat, watching with horror the undead surrounding the dark-skinned, silver-haired girl. The girl shone now more like a powerful magic light, and the undead nearest her covered their eyes with their hands.
Olive looked up at the nobleman and noticed with panic the ghouls coming down upon them. “Giogi!” she shrieked.
Huge arms lifted Olive from behind and tossed her onto the top of the coach. Olive looked down to see Mother Lleddew, once again on her feet, facing the pack of ghouls with her arms outstretched. Her whiteless eyes held a manic gleam. The priestess roared a guttural, incoherent cry of rage. Then the ghouls were upon her, toppling her and burying her with their bodies.
Olive shouted Giogi’s name again.
The roar, and Olive’s shouts, finally attracted the noble’s attention from the girl at the temple. He looked down to where Olive pointed frantically just in time to see Lleddew disappear under a torrent of undead.
Like a man awakening from a dream, Giogi whispered, “No, no,” and then shook himself to action, screaming, “No!” He leaped down and began stabbing like a madman at the pile of ghouls.
Olive wondered if, by now, it wasn’t too late for the priestess when the pile of undead began to shift and grow, like a swelling seed. A huge paw broke through one side of the pile, flinging a pair of ghouls off. Then a second paw shot out, spearing a ghoul clean through the chest with its claws.
A huge black bear waded out of the pile of ghouls, shaking their broken bodies off it like they were hunting dogs. The bear’s forehead and chest were marked with silver-haired crescents, and Olive saw Mother Lleddew’s manic gleam in the beast’s eyes.
The great bear roared, a roar more powerful than the one Lleddew had made a moment before. The remaining ghouls broke away from the pile and fled from the bear.
An eerie keening rose from atop the hill. Giogi looked back at the temple. He could no longer make out the girl who Mother Lleddew had called a Shard. There was nothing but a white fire burning at the heart of the temple. The undead on the hilltop were fleeing into the woods.
The bear fell to all fours and wobbled unsteadily. Its front paws looked as if they’d been caught in a trap, and its massive shoulders slumped. Olive scrambled down from the coach once more and checked the bear’s wounds. They were many and deep.
“Get the carriage door,” Olive ordered Giogi.
The nobleman obeyed automatically; his attention was fixed on the hilltop. The bright white flames seemed to be dying down, and the noble caught sight again of the Shard, but she seemed to fade with the fire. A thick, glittering fog rolled around her, and she seemed to grow as one with the mist, which drifted out the open sides of the House of the Lady.
Olive looked at the mysterious, growing fog with anxiety. “Hop in, Mother Lleddew,” the halfling said. She gave Giogi a sharp nudge. “Get up there and drive,” she ordered.
The bear scrabbled into the carriage and collapsed onto the boxes of food. Olive slammed the door and climbed up beside Giogi.
The nobleman turned about and looked over the roof of the carriage. The Shard had vanished. The cloud roiled and bubbled as it descended the hill, and the undead fled before it. Those who were caught in its coils screamed and then collapsed beneath it and were silent.
Suddenly a single lance of white light shot up from the center of the temple, pierced through the roof, and struck the lone dark cloud overhead. As if it were a wounded beast, the cloud shot away from the light striking it. Afternoon sunlight returned to the hill immediately. The fog became milky white and began dissipating in the warm spring sunshine.
“She’s gone,” Giogi whispered.
With a sigh, Olive took up the reins and slapped the horses into motion. The unevaporated edges of the fog slid beneath the carriage and through the horse’s feet. The mist hid the road from their sight, but caused them no harm. Of the undead that had haunted the woods beside the road there was no sign.
From inside the carriage, the bear echoed the Shard’s keening with a plaintive wail of its own.
17
The Spur
Cat leaned over Drone’s journal with her elbows holding the binding open and her head propped up in her hands. Despite the shattered window and broken door, the tower room was a comfortable temperature, as long as she kept her fur-lined cape draped around her shoulders. Isolated from the rest of the family’s living quarters, the room was also marvelously quiet, but the mage could not concentrate. The old wizard’s crabbed handwriting blurred before her eyes, and her gaze wandered about the room, unable to focus on anything.
Idly she pulled out the amulet of protection from her skirt pocket. She could feel five lumps of varying sizes and shapes wrapped in the silk. Her curiosity prodded at her to peek at just one of the lumps, but with a sudden burst of will, she shoved the amulet back in her pocket. Ignoring Mistress Ruskettle’s advice would be like asking Tymora to send me more bad luck, and I’ve had more than my share of that, Cat thought.
She stared into space and let her mind wander from the duty at hand to the events of the past year. Nothing had gone right for her since the previous summer. She’d awakened on Midsummer Day in a Zhentil Keep alley with no memory of how she’d gotten there, or indeed any memory at all beyond her name and place of birth. The rest of her history had vanished, leaving an irritating void in her head and an uneasy feeling in her heart.